South Carolina

January 19, 2008

Matt Yglesias mentions another Romney advantage I didn't touch on Thursday night: He has an explicit "delegate strategy" and is executing it pretty well. He had the highest delegate count coming into today and will pick up many more with his overwhelming victory in Nevada, which has more delegates up for grabs than the higher-profile South Carolina contest. As Matt says: "At the end of the day, you need delegates to win.

January 19, 2008

It's another gold medal for Mitt Romney today in Nevada--if he can pull out a bronze in South Carolina he'll soon be approaching Michael Phelps-esque levels of decoration. But in watching the coverage of the election returns, I heard a spokesman of Romney's emphasize that Nevada has more delegates at stake than the higher-profile South Carolina contest. Indeed it does--Nevada has 34 delegates to the Palmetto State's 24. Considering South Carolina has on the order of 1.8 million more people, I wondered why this was the case.

January 18, 2008

In case you haven't read our South Carolina coverage this week, here's a roundup. In her jaunt around primary country, Eve Fairbanks encountered Southern yuppie prudery and creative ways of breaking the wall between church and state. After Romney's Michigan upset, she attended a Mitt Romney revival that evoked a U2 concert and discovered a new phenom: pro-Romney women in heat.
Of course, the main S.C. attraction is campaign dirt.

January 18, 2008

In case you haven't read our South Carolina coverage this week, here's a roundup. In her jaunt around primary country, Eve Fairbanks encountered Southern yuppie prudery and creative ways of breaking the wall between church and state. After Romney's Michigan upset, she attended a Mitt Romney revival that evoked a U2 concert and discovered a new phenom: pro-Romney women in heat.
Of course, the main S.C. attraction is campaign dirt.

January 18, 2008

From somewhere in South Carolina, Eve raises a few questions about last night's sure-to-be-wrong-in-retrospect Romney post. Eve says:
[W]hen you write that "with his war chest, Romney should be able to sneak into the top two in Florida," I'm not sure that's right—Romney's war chest didn't get him anywhere near the top two here. And I wonder if you underestimate Huckabee's resilience going forward to February 5. Huckabee leads Romney in national polls, and it's not a Hillary-esque name-recognition thing, since Huckabee has no more claim to name recognition than Romney does.

January 18, 2008

Not that dirty, according to Politico's Jonathan Martin, who has a great piece on how clean this South Carolina GOP Primary is, despite the McCain campaign's best efforts to act as if it's 2000 all over again.

January 16, 2008

Columbia, SC-- This morning--not on his public schedule--Mike Huckabee spoke to hundreds of South Carolina pastors at a swanky, no-press-allowed two-day conference held in the ballroom of Columbia’s Metropolitan Convention Center. The group that put the free-to-pastors confab on is a purposely shadowy outfit called the “Renewal Project,” which is funded by anonymous donors and organized a similar pre-caucus pastors’ convention at the Des Moines Marriott in December. There’s another well-timed one coming up next week in Orlando, before the Florida primary.

January 14, 2008

... in South Carolina, that is! Here's his newest mailer (click here to enlarge or if the image isn't showing up in your browser):
Bridget, in case you don't remember, was the vehicle for the "black baby" smear that undid McCain in South Carolina in 2000.
-- Eve Fairbanks

January 11, 2008

Obviously the endorsement of South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn would be a big deal for Obama. But, if it comes at the cost of awkwardly moving race to the center of the nomination fight (both in South Carolina and elsewhere), it could end up being counter-productive. From today's New York Times:
Mr. Clyburn, a veteran of the civil rights movement and a power in state Democratic politics, put himself on the sidelines more than a year ago to help secure an early primary for South Carolina, saying he wanted to encourage all candidates to take part.

January 11, 2008

When Hillary Clinton basically went negative on Martin Luther King earlier this week, I remember thinking that was the final nail in her coffin. In hindsight, of course, I should have realized that those comments might not ruffle that many feathers in New Hampshire (where it wasn't until 1999, after all, that the state celebrated MLK Day).
But South Carolina's another story. And, in today's NYT, we're starting to see that story unfold:
WASHINGTON — Representative James E.